JOHN MITCHINSON AND GUESTS
Unbound Live 1
The award-winning crowd-funded publisher offers the Hay audience a chance to choose what gets published. Mixing authors whose books have already been funded with others pitching their ideas for books they want to write, this is a literary Dragons’ Den with a difference. Legendary writer and performer Salena Godden pitches her childhood memoir, Red Dwarf star Robert Llewellyn presents his science fiction sequel, novelist Charles Fernyhough asks whether neuroscience changes love, Strangler Hugh Cornwell and archaeologist-turned-crimewriter Francis Pryor compete for your support with a little help from publisher and QI Elf-master John Mitchinson. Light poetic relief from performance poet George Chopping.

You can find out more about the book by reading this blog post and this one. It's my first novel since The Auctioneer was published, fourteen years ago. If you've read the book already, you must be a subscriber. Thank you.

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Publication day for A Box of Birds is just around the corner, so it was good to get a chance to set out some of the motivations behind the novel in last weekend's Guardian Review. As I explained in the piece, fiction gives us an unparalleled opportunity to understand the value of neuroscientific accounts of behaviour and experience. A lively comment thread has been building: you can join in here. The poet Helen Mort has written a thoughtful response on her blog, including a wonderful poem about Phantom Limb Syndrome.

We are in the middle of a debate about the status of neuroscience. Against the deceptive allure of neuroimaging and reported sightings of ‘brain centres’ for everything from sarcasm to religious experience, there are stern reassurances that, if we were ever to work out the scientific basis of consciousness, it would be too complicated for us to understand. We use lazy neurospeak and stock up on brain porn, but do we draw from it knowledge we can use? Is neuroscience really changing the way we understand ourselves?

It might sound like an unlikely source of evidence, but we can find out something about the proper treatment of neuroscience by looking at how it functions in fiction. If tracing behaviour and experience to its neural underpinnings really offers a new understanding of humanity, novelists are bound to draw on it in revealing how their characters understand themselves. And writers’ use of neuroscientific ideas will tell us something about how we consume such explanations and what meaning we extract from them.

In one sense, neuro-explanations seem to challenge the mechanisms by which novels work. Neuroscientists warn us that we may have no freewill, no ‘self’ at the helm of our behaviour; their work shows that our memories are leaky reconstructions and that even our visual perception of the world is a system of illusions. How do these messages change what we do, how we feel, how we decide to live? Fiction is a perfect medium for exploring these questions.

Which makes it slightly surprising that the neuro doesn’t actually feature all that prominently in literary fiction. A 2009 article by Marco Roth pointed out that bookish neuroscience is often connected with atypical and pathological behaviour. For example, Gary Lambert’s depression in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections gives a central role to his screwy neurotransmitters, but we don’t get neuro-explanations for the (debatably) more sane members of the Lambert family. Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker is more interested in the brain-damaged patient, Mark Schluter, than with the science-inflected self-descriptions of his neuropsychologist, Gerald Weber.

If neuroscientific ideas are really going to prove their worth to novelists, they need to be able to provide satisfactory accounts of ordinary, non-pathological experience. One novel to attempt that is Ian McEwan’s Saturday, which tells the story of the neurosurgeon, Henry Perowne, and his run-ins with the violent, chromosomally-disordered Baxter. Intimate with the workings of the brain, Perowne sees his own experience in terms of the bioelectrical processes that underlie it. Feeling a ‘sustained, distorting euphoria’, for example, he speculates that ‘there’s been a chemical accident while he slept—something like a spilled tray of drinks, prompting […] a kindly cascade of intracellular events’.

Perowne’s professional familiarity with neuroscience certainly colours his reflections on himself, but it’s not clear that it changes his relationships with his own experience and behaviour: it doesn’t make him less trusting of his own memory or visual perception, for example. More importantly, this immersion in neuroscience doesn’t change the story. Setting aside a couple of episodes where Perowne’s medical knowledge is directly exploited, the plot of Saturday would not unfold any differently if he had been ignorant of brain science. Baxter’s wild behaviour ultimately has a genetic rather than a neurological cause (he suffers from Huntington’s disease). When Baxter’s course of action is violently altered, it is poetry—a recital of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’—rather than neuroscience that is effective in changing behaviour. Brain is a correlate of action, not a driver of it.

Other novelists are less optimistic about neuroscience’s capacity to make a difference. In Sebastian Faulks’ recent A Possible Life, the neuroscientist Elena pins the human capacity for self-awareness to a particular junction between ‘Glockner’s Isthmus’ (a fictional nexus of selfhood) and ‘the site of episodic memory’. While the neuroscience of Faulks’ tale fails to withstand close scrutiny, more interesting is the discovery’s lack of effect on the protagonist. Fêted internationally for her momentous breakthrough, Elena can’t connect her new neuroscientific reality to her own experience—or she won’t let herself. ‘She knew it to be truthful, valid and endlessly provable, but she didn’t allow the implications to affect the way she lived’.

Faulks’ story seems to be telling us that, even if the scientific message turned out to be manageably simple, being able to reduce quintessentially human mental capacities to neural processes would not add much to our understanding. Perhaps neuroscience will continue to be most useful in accounting for disorder; indeed, perhaps its way of working will be to turn everything into the pathological. Roth’s complaint about the fictional dominance of neuro-dysfunction mirrors a wider trend, evidenced in the recent outcry about the psychiatry manual DSM-V, to see clinical symptoms where once we would have seen ordinary human variation.

Another reason for not expecting to see too many neuro-explanations in fiction is that they may just be too complex. Novels give us manuals for living, accounts of who we are that we can use as human beings, and neuroscience may be working at the wrong level of explanation. The kind of neuro-explanations that we might one day arrive at might be too complicated for most of us to understand. If that’s the case, we’re unlikely to see novelists trying to weave them into a narrative. Fiction might function as a litmus test: not of what is true, but of what is useful.

It’s also possible that we won’t always privilege neuro-truth above other kinds. Just as genetic explanations seemed less seductive once the human genome (with its surprisingly small complement of genes) was described, so our enthusiam for the brain might wane as we recognise that much of its work actually translates into the functioning of a disappointingly small number of ‘core’ networks. There is still mind-bogglingly complexity—subsidiary neural centres ‘plug in’ to core networks in all sorts of complicated ways—but it might be of a more boring kind than that promised by a tally of 86 billion neurones.

Fiction exists for its own purposes, and writers and readers will rightly resist attempts to turn it into ‘evidence’ for or against anything. It’s possible that neuroscience is just too new for its ideas to have permeated literary fiction in the way that those other paradigm-changers, Darwinism and psychoanalysis, did. As a novelist, I am interested in exploring characters for whom the networks of the cortex are a real, charged presence. How does this understanding affect what you do when things start happening, when you have to make moral choices? Because of the way it puts subjectivity, character and moral action at its heart, the novel is the ideal crucible for the experiment.

Charles Fernyhough’s literary thriller A Box of Birds, about brains and those who work with them, is published by Unbound on 7 May.

Buy A Box Of Birds

Buy Pieces of Light (UK)

A Box of Birds: Reviews

'Arrestingly good prose… A thought-provoking novel that wrestles with the fundamentals of human nature.' Financial Times

'The plot, which flies past at genuine ‘page turner’ pace, involves a race to map the (fictional) Lorenzo Circuit, ‘the deep root-system of the self… the basis of memory, emotion and consciousness in the human brain’… I’m grateful for the siren warnings from the storytelling machine that is Charles Fernyhough.' The Psychologist

'A pleasantly sardonic narrator… There is… a certain edgy propulsion to the story, and the reveal of what is really going on in the bowels of Sansom’s research centre is deliciously horrible and deftly understated.' Guardian

'Part love story, part race against time to beat the baddies, Fernyhough can certainly write.' Daily Mail

'It’s rare these days to read a writer who cares about ideas in the way that the great nineteenth-century novelists did... This is both a serious novel and a great read.' Sara Maitland

'Exhilarating, thought-provoking and well worth the wait.' Andrew Crumey

Pieces of Light: Reviews

'Pieces of Light is utterly fascinating and superbly written. I learned more about memory from this book than any other. There are few science books around of this class.' Guardian

'Thoughtful… a deft guide to discoveries that have led memory researchers to stress the centrality of storytelling.' Booklist

'As absorbing as it is thought-provoking.' Sunday Business Post

'Remarkable storytelling skills... Seamlessly intersperses the personal aspects of [his] journey with descriptions of cutting-edge research into spatial naviation and memory manipulation, as well as new ideas about how memory works.' Moheb Costandi, Scientific American MIND

'With elegance and clinical sympathy, Fernyhough tells the stories of patients with various forms of brain damage that result in amnesia... a good, accessible read for anyone interested in their own recollections.' Professor Steven Rose, BBC Focus Magazine

'An absorbing guidebook to the mysterious terrain of human memory... In the tradition of Oliver Sacks’ casually shrewd scientific writing, the book blends dispatches from the frontiers of science with compassionate human anecdotes. Fernyhough’s enthralling narrative delivers gripping insight on the way memories shape our lives.'Editors’ Choice for w/c 19 March, iBookstore

'Weaving scientific research from psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, Fernyhough explains that our brains don’t record experiences as cameras do; rather, we store key elements, then reconstruct the experiences when we need them, imbuing them with present-day feelings and the benefit of hindsight.' Washington Post(read more)

'In its stunning blend of the literary with the scientific, Pieces of Light illuminates ordinary and extraordinary stories to remind us that who we are now has everything to do with who we were once, and that identity itself is intricately rooted in transporting moments of remembrance. We are what we remember.' André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt and Harvard Square

'His examination [is] welcoming and accessible to lay readers. His analysis is wide-ranging... He also covers a wide swath of literary and historical ground... A refreshingly social take on an intensely personal experience.' Publishers Weekly (read more)

'A multidisciplinary approach to explaining memory... Will be intriguing for readers interested in the borderlands where memoir, fiction and science overlap.' Kirkus Reviews (read more)

'In this lyrical exploration of our powers of recall, psychologist and novelist Charles Fernyhough argues that our memories are worth cherishing - even though some of what we think we remember is, in fact, fiction.' New Scientist Books of the Year (read more)

'In Pieces of Light, Charles Fernyhough has had the arresting idea of writing a book about memory that is also a memoir. As a psychologist clearly well up on the latest research, he shows how memory itself relies on language and storytelling. Investigating his own memories with a writerly eye, he brings to vibrant life scenes from a childhood refreshingly free of misery.' Sunday Times Books of the Year (read more)

'In his hybrid of autobiography, journalism and pop psychology, Fernyhough lets the stories speak for themselves to highlight memory’s personal, subjective and fragile qualities. Fernyhough takes us on a captivating journey into the mind. And he does so with great style.' Telegraph (read more)

'Outstanding… Fernyhough’s skills as a writer are evident both in the beautiful prose and in the way he uses literature to illustrate his argument… He draws on both science and art to marvellous effect.' Observer (read more)

'Restrained and lyrical... an immense pleasure.' New Scientist (read more)

'A sophisticated blend of findings from science, ideas from literature and examples from personal narratives… refreshing, well judged and at times moving. This is an unusual book but a very rewarding one.' Times Higher Education (read more)

'Fernyhough deftly guides us through memory's many facets... Often using himself as a test case, he adds context with research and snippets from a raft of great writers. A thoughtful study of how we make sense of ourselves.' Nature (read more)

'Absorbing... In offering us a meditation on memory, Fernyhough has something important to say about one of the forces that is central to our lives.' The Lady (read more)

'Fernyhough is a gifted writer who can turn any experience into lively prose... The stories in Pieces of Light... will entertain anyone who reads them.' Financial Times (read more)

'Many popular science writers try to blend the autobiographical and the anecdotal into their work; few do it as seamlessly and successfully as Charles Fernyhough.' Blackwell's Book Podcasts (read more)

'Fernyhough argues that we don’t simply possess a memory; we reconstruct it anew every time we need to remember… Through his own experiences and those of others, from the very young to the very old, he explores the mystery of remembering and the ambiguity of forgetting.' Saga Magazine

'An enthralling investigation of that ‘thing’ we call memory… manages to write about complex things in a clear and understandable way.' Ian McMillan, The Verb

'Pieces of Light will both linger in your memory and change the way you think about it.’ Daniel L. Schacter